Debate team preps for nationals

by Eva Dameron

Daily Lobo

After six years of hardly competing, the UNM Speech and Debate team is participating in national tournaments again.

The team placed second at the Novice Nationals in Georgia on March 10.

Members are preparing to go to nationals in Oregon this weekend.

"This is the first year we've been active in an extremely long time," said Emily Lappin, team officer and competitor. "We've had a lot of problems trying to get funding and getting the support we need getting to travel."

The team has kept itself alive as a student-run organization, hosting high school debate tournaments as a way to bring in funds. They charge a school registration fee, individual registration fees and judging fees.

Trey Smith, a coordinator in the Student Activities Center, and professor Dirk Gibson volunteer their time to advise and coach the team.

"We apply for ASUNM funds a couple times a year, and they really help us out," Smith said. "They'll pay for travel - not as much as we'd like - but they do what they can afford. The high school tournament pays the rest of the funds."

He said the team gets about $7,000 a year from ASUNM. Standard funding for a university debate team is $40,000.

The team meets two or three times a week to practice, Lappin said.

"We do parliamentary debates against each other," she said.

She said a topic is announced shortly before debate time, and each team of two people has 15 minutes to secure an argument.

"Then there's about 45 minutes of structured speech time and questioning," she said. "We're allowed to interrupt each other's speeches, to try to make them look stupid."

Lappin said she loves having to take the side of an argument she's opposed to.

"That's why debate is such a challenge," she said. "You often times have to go against your own beliefs. I've learned just as much if not more through my debate activities than any of my structured classes."

The team is always eager to get new people involved, Lappin said. There are 25 people on the team, although about eight actively compete.

"It's great for law majors, political majors, pre-law majors," she said. "We're generally philosophy and economics majors."

All of the tournaments they've participated in have been out of state.

Coaches who aren't affiliated with the teams volunteer to judge in the competitions, Lappin said.

"They look for excellent speaking and persuasion skills, cogent analysis, in-depth thought process," she said. "We have debated everything from foreign policy, national security and gays in the military to the Miss America Pageant."

Team President Daniel Conway is the only one on the team who does the speech part of the speech and debate team. He said he does a lot of interpretation of literature. Before reading his piece, he gives his interpretation behind it.

"I do the political argument portion and then the actual piece I selected," he said. "I interpret it the way I feel it argues. I use the words of the author as my direction."

Conway found out the first week of March that he qualified to compete in a national tournament in Florida.

"I do our poetry, drama, prose and POI, which is program oral interpretation, like slam readings," he said. "They consider it a speech event."

He said in tournaments he reads works that have a political stance or lessons on values.

He read a prose poem called "Letter to a Nonexistent God" during a recent tournament.

"The interpretation was taken from a guy who sees his father dead," Conway said. "He gambles with the idea that there could be life after death. It has a lesson more than an argument. The lesson is you can never give love too soon because you don't know how soon it'll be too late, so you have to tell people you love them because you don't know when they're going to go."

Student Austin Duus was on the team that took second in nationals.

"This year I mostly did parliamentary debates," Duus said. "You debate a variety of different topics - policy, values and metaphors. It's like British Parliament where you have a government team and an opposition team."

He said his favorite type of debate is policy.

"It has the most applicable kind of debate," he said. "It's very real-world."

Arguing the other side of his beliefs has taught him a lot, he said.

"It makes me think there is very little truth in the world, but there are various arguments for anything," he said.